A scant three years after Jaws first reduced beach attendance throughout the world, this enjoyable rip-off came along. And when I say 'rip-off', I mean exactly that. Director Joe Dante actually made it explicit that the use of numerous small fishes instead of a single large one was merely an attempt to conceal the derivative nature of the film, which should come as no surprise considering that it is a Roger Corman production. Piranha's tagline tells the same story: "Then... you were shocked by the great white shark - Now... you are at the mercy of a 1000 jaws!" (emphasis added) Contrarily to Jaws though, the present film will unlikely make you reconsider that next dip in the river on account of its ludicrous premise. As you well know, piranhas live exclusively in South American waters. So the screenwriters were hard-pressed to find a suitable explanation right from the beginning, which is only one of the many challenges facing the production team and their minuscule budget. Being a staple of American horror, the botched military experiment was selected as justification for the appearance of the killer fishes. And although this convinces no one, it all makes for a very entertaining camp film highlighted by ruthless attacks on unsuspecting children and some hilarious turns by a patchwork of TV actors and cult figures (including British scream queen Barbara Steele and Corman regular Dick Miller).
An inch away from being fish food... Children in Dante's films
are often the most powerful catalysts of horror
The film begins conventionally enough with the demise of two youths out for a midnight dip beyond restricted lines. After crossing the fence surrounding an old military site, they both strip and jump into a fenced pool without even a thought about the piranhas swarming beneath the surface. Following their deaths, private investigator Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies from Sssssss (1973) and yes, The Sound of Music (1965) where she portrays one of the adorable von Trapp children) is sent to find out what happened. Upon reaching the small community of Lost River, she meets drunken hermit Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) who reluctantly accepts to take her up to the old military base. After the pair sneaks in and finds bloodied evidence of the two youths' visit, they figure that their bodies must not be far. Hence, Maggie singlehandedly decides to drain the pool located within the compound in order to search the bottom for remains. When a weird-looking man erupts into the room and aggressively tries to interrupt them, Paul and Maggie immediately make him out to be a madman and knock him out cold, oblivious as they are to his confused warnings. As you have probably figured out, the piranha pool drains right into the nearby river and thus, Maggie thus manages to infest the calm waters with killer fishes genetically enhanced for maximum ferocity. As it turns out, the man they knocked out was a respected geneticist who originally bred piranhas for the use by the army during the Cold War. When the man comes to, he steals Paul and Maggie's jeep in an attempt to quickly reach the town but crashes it instead, leaving the two protagonists with a severely injured man on their hands and no vehicle. After bringing the unconscious geneticist back to Paul's cabin, the pair eventually loads him unto an artisanal raft conceived by Paul and his daughter in order to reach the hospital located downriver. When the man recovers consciousness once more, he calmly explains that Maggie and Paul have cursed the river, filling it with the deadly fruits of his experiments. And so, the protagonists' raft ride becomes a dangerous race against the clock to reach the summer camp attended by Paul's daughter as well as to prevent the grand opening of the most recent tourist attraction of the area, the Lost River Lake Resort, despite the obvious reluctance of owner Buck Gardner (Dick Miller), all the while dodging the outstretched arms of the military and the local law enforcement.
Heather Menzies and Bradford Dillman form quite an unlikely duo,
which finds relevance only in its trying to solve the crisis they originated
(don't blink otherwise you might miss Menzies' breasts... or are they?)
The forced comparison with Alexandre Aja's 2010 version might not be favorable for this film in terms of special effects, set pieces or breast sizes, but it still remains a more efficient film. Its budget limitations actually help it steer clear of complacency and superficiality, making it a truly worthy effort in creative filmmaking. CGI effects were not the answer to everything back then and you actually had to work hard in order to convey the threat represented by monstrous beasts, and most of all, underwater beasts. Here, Dante uses quick editing both to conceal the rubbery texture of the props and to emulate the quick movements of the predators, creating some truly exhilarating, purely cinematographic events in the process. What was true for Psycho (1960) is thus also true for Piranha: the knife, or in this case the teeth, do not need to penetrate flesh in order to create exciting scenes of carnage and contribute a permeating sense of sensuality to the horrific events circumvented by the camera. Frenzied speed and quickly varying angles easily do the trick. As for the annoying presence of chattering noise on the soundtrack during the attacks, it contributes nothing in the way of realism but rather heightens the sense of aggression we derive from these attacks. This all goes to show that the apparent technical limitations of the film are actually opportunities to transcend a medium that often becomes victim to complacency. Thus, the frenzied editing, which was originally a mere setback of the film's minuscule budget eventually became its most precious asset and storytelling device. As we can see, creativity is born out of necessity. Which is the reason why we should still have B-movies made in Hollywood. Just think about it for a second: if instead of using hundreds of thousands of dollars to cast Paris Hilton or some other expandable starlet in a horror film, you would give that money to a hungry young filmmaker and demand he (or she) make a feature film for the following month, who knows what might happen, and what great new talent could thus reveal itself. Just look at what Corman did for Dante, and for many other filmmakers and film stars including Jonathan Demme, Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola.
These may well be mere plastic fishes, but they do so much
more than Aja's oversized, over-fearsome CGI piranhas
As many of Corman's productions, Piranha is deliciously irreverent, poking fun at the military complex, law enforcement and just about every form of authority who are all seen as incompetent, irresponsible and uncaring, with cops and soldiers bumbling about for our amusement, being knocked unconscious, deprived of their pants and even eaten alive. The film titillates us with the ever-present possibility of female nudity: in one early scene, the actress onscreen is so prompt in removing her clothing that we get a fair glimpse at her pubic hair; later, the leading lady flashes her breasts in a desperate attempt to distract a possibly-gay soldier; then, two lovely camp counselors are just about to remove their clothes before taking a swim when their grumpy boss shows up and spoils all our fun. This is all very exploitative, but in a joyous, smirk-inducing way. But even more surprising than the exploitation of nubile female flesh is the exploitation of kid flesh. Not in the pornographic sense, mind you, but in the horrific sense. That said, there is an extensive scene wherein a group of young campers is ruthlessly attacked by the piranhas. And contrarily to what generally happens in such instances, the killer fishes do take bites out of the children. And there are pools of blood forming around fetishistic close-ups of young flesh. I was less appalled by this than exhilarated. It's not often that you see children in danger and it creates much greater affect than adults in danger. Nobody wants to see children die, and this is precisely why this sequence is more effective than any other in the film. And it is also why the head-crushing scene is so important in The Toxic Avenger (1984). Because it establishes the killers to be arch-evil super-villains worthy of every horrible torture coming to them. Had it been a grown man whose head they would've crushed... it wouldn't have had half the impact. In Piranha, no child's head is likewise mutilated, but a similar kind of boundary-crossing is used to enhance affect. Thus, this is not exactly like Lloyd Kaufman's great, big "fuck you" to political correctness, more like a "suck my balls". After all, Corman was out there to make money, not purely visceral art trash. He was biting, sure, but he was also a ruthlessly efficient professional. The social critique within his films was neatly contained within conventional storytelling frameworks, rarely spilling beyond the incisively humorous dialogues or the grandiloquent characterization of certain villains. Here, the eco-friendly, anti-capitalist stance of the film is relegated mostly to instrumental, and often derivative plot devices. The central issue concerning mutated fishes is played mostly as a necessary way to justify the presence of piranhas in North American waters but obviously, the condemnation of genetic manipulation and the unbalancing of the ecosystem are not far behind. This rings especially true if you consider the early speech by bona fide character actor Keenan Wynn, who plays here aging hermit Jack. He basically tells Paul about how the river is a way of life, how it wakes you up and puts you to sleep with its gentle streaming, how it feeds you and gives you company. And that way of life is precisely what is at stake here, what is endangered by ruthless entrepreneurship, undesirable life forms thrown into the ecosystem and polluted waste coursing through underwater pipes (with which Paul eventually conquers the piranhas). This critique also expands to the irresponsible business venture of entrepreneur extraordinaire Buck Gardner, a man who will stop at nothing to sell his (terribly artificial) waterside paradise, the Lost River Lake Resort. By using Dick Miller's unique brand of expressionless expressivity, Dante fashions an hilarious icon of laisser-faire capitalism. Contradictorily, the man who will stop at nothing to please his clientele is willing to ignore all threat against it. And in the end, he is revealed as only one more powerful incompetent who takes important decisions for others while looking only inward for justification.
"There's more to life than booze", dixit the late Keenan Wynn,
"there's also pure water"
As I mentioned earlier, this here is a typical Corman production as it was the launching pad of a future mammoth of genre filmmaking. Despite such films as The Howling (1981), Gremlins (1984), Innerspace (1987), Matinee (1993) and the great, if somewhat underrated Small Soldiers (1998) at his credit, Joe Dante seems to have always chased after the memory of Piranha, which is precisely the kind of films he celebrated throughout his entire career. The low-budget, exploitative genre thriller made with tender, loving care and childish good humor, as exalted in his first film, Hollywood Boulevard (1976) as well as in Matinee and Trapped Ashes (2006), constitutes the epitome of filmmaking as suggested by his body of work. And although most of his films contain exacerbated versions of the main themes from Piranha, namely the mix of horror and humor, an overwhelming concern for children and the power of their imagination as well as a marked disdain for blind corporate advancement, none share the purity of his original genre film. With this film more than with any other he ever directed, he narrows in on the cheap but spectacular cinema of William Castle, whom was both an inspiration for Dante and Roger Corman.
In the end, Piranha is a cheap film. Cheap and effective, with little concessions made to plausibility. The dialogue is savory and the pace is fast. There are cars burning rubber in fast-motion, exploding jeeps and plenty of blood pools and plastic teeth. Plus, there's Barbara Steele and Dick Miller. For 600,000 clams, 40 times less than the new version cost, I'd buy that in a second, especially if you consider the talent at work here: other from Dante, you've got John Sayles (Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Lone Star (1996)), Mark Goldblatt (Oscar-nominated editor of T2 (1991) and Saturn Award co-winner (with Joe Dante) for the present film) and Phil Tippett (Oscar-winning visual artist of Jurassic Park (1993) and Starship Troopers (1997)) amongst others. This is a typical Corman-produced quickie, using creative filmmaking in order to conceal budget limitations, managing to build a cult following as well as the accolades of critics.
3/5 Intentionally funny, with truly well-crafted piranha attack scenes, this smart exploitation quickie manages to greatly transcend its budget.
